Two old women were sitting on the rocks that lay in a great uneven wall along the seashore beyond the village of Rundangan. They were knitting. Their red petticoats formed the only patch of color among the gray crags about them and behind them. In front of them stretched the sea, blue and calm. It sparkled far out, where the sun was shining on it. The sky was blue and empty, and the winds were silent. The only noise came from the sea, near the shore. It was just low tide. The water babbled and flopped along the seaweed on the low rocks that lay far out, black strips of serrated rocks with red seaweed growing on them. It was a spring evening and the air was warm and fresh, as if it had just been sprinkled with eau de Cologne. The old women were talking in low voices as they knitted woollen stockings.

'Ah yes,' said one of them, called Big Bridget Conlon, an old woman of seventy, of great size and strength, with big square jaws like a man, high cheekbones, red complexion, and wistful blue eyes that always seemed to be in mourning about something. She made a wedge of a corner of the little black-cotton shawl that was tied around her neck and cleaned out her right ear with it. 'I don't know,' she said, 'why it is, but I always get a pain in that ear when there's bad weather coming. There it is now, just as if there was a little stream running along inside in it. My grandmotherGod have mercy on her soul used to have the same thing happen to her.'

'Yes,' said the other old woman with a lazy and insincere sigh, 'there is no going against tokens when they are sent that way.' The other woman, Mary Mullen, was only sixty-five, and her reddish hair had not yet turned very gray. She had shifty gray eyes and she was very thin about the body. She was greatly feared in the village of Rundangan because of her slandering tongue and her habit of listening at people's doors at night to eavesdrop.

"Heh, heh,' said Big Bridget, looking out mournfully at the sea, 'sure we only live by the grace of God, sure enough, with the sea always ready to devour us. And yet only for it we would starve. Many a thing is a queer thing sure enough.' She stuck the end of a knitting-needle against her teeth and leaned her head against it. With brooding eyes she looked out at the sea that way, as if trying to explain something.

The two old women lapsed into silence again and knitted away. The tide turned and it began to flow. From where the women sat the land stretched away out on either side into the sea. To the east of them it stretched out in high cliffs, and to the west it ran almost level with the sea for about a mile, a bare stretch of naked, gray rock, strewn with boulders. Farther west it rose gradually into high cliffs. Now a light breeze crept along the crags in fitful gusts, here and there, irregularly. The women did not notice it.

Then suddenly a sharp gust of wind came up from the sea and blew the cold women's petticoats in the air like beal

loons. It fluttered about viciously for a few moments and then disappeared again. The old women sniffed anxiously and rolled up their knitting by a common impulse before they spoke a word. They looked at one another.

'What did I say to you, Mary?' said Big Bridget in an awed whisper, in which, however, there was a weird melancholy note of intense pleasure. She covered her mouth with the palm of her right hand and made a motion as if she were throwing her teeth at the other woman. It was a customary gesture with her. "That pain in my right ear is always right,' she continued; 'it's a storm, sure enough.'

'God between us and all harm,' said Mary Mullen, 'and that man of mine is out fishing with my son Patrick and Stephen Halloran. Good Mother of Mercy,' she whimpered uneasily as she got to her feet, 'they are the only people out fishing from the whole village and a storm is coming. Am n't I the unfortunate woman! Drowned, drowned they will be.' Suddenly she worked herself into a wild frenzy of fear and lamentation, and she spread her hands out toward the sea. Standing on the summit of the line of boulders with her hands stretched out and wisps of her gray hair flying about her face, while the rising and whistling wind blew her red petticoat backward so that her lean thighs were sharply outlined, she began to curse the sea and bemoan her fate.

'Oh, God forgive you, woman of no sense,' cried Big Bridget, struggling to her feet with difficulty on account of the rheumatic pains she had in her right hip, 'what is it you are saying? Don't tempt the sea with your words. Don't talk of drowning.' There was a sudden ferocity in her words that was strangely akin to the rapid charges of the wind that was coming up from the sea about them, cold, contemptuous,

and biting, like bullets flying across a battlefield fired by unknown men against others whom they have never seen, the fierce and destructive movement of maddened nature, blind and rejoicing in madness.

Mary Mullen, with her hands outstretched, paid no heed to Big Bridget, but she shrieked at the top of her voice: 'Drowned, drowned they will be!' She also seemed to be possessed with a frenzy in which sorrow and joy lost their values and had intermingled in some emotion that transcended themselves. The sea began to swell and break its back with rivulets of foam.

People came running down to the beach from the village as the storm grew in intensity. They gathered together on the wall of boulders around the two old women. There was a cluster of red petticoats and heads hooded in little black shawls, while the men strutted about talking anxiously and looking out to sea toward the west. The sea was getting rougher with every wave that broke along the rocky beach. It began to growl and toss about and make noises as if monstrous teeth were being ground. It became alive and spoke with a multitude of different yells that inspired the listeners with horror and hypnotized them into feeling mad with the sea. Their faces set in a deep frown and their eyes had a distant fiery look in them. They shouted angrily when they spoke to one another. Each contradicted the other. They swore with wild gestures.

Stephen Halloran's wife squatted down on a boulder beside Mary Mullen, and these two women whose men were out fishing and in danger from the storm became the centre of interest. They arrogated to themselves a vast importance from the fact that their men were in danger of death from the sea. Their faces were lengthened with an expression of sorrow, but there was a

fierce pride in their sharp eyes, like the wives of ancient warriors who watched on the ramparts of stone forts while their men fought in front.

Stephen Halloran's wife, a palefaced, weak-featured woman with weak eyes that were devoid of lashes and were red around the rims, kept rolling her little head from side to side as she searched the sea to the west, looking out from under her eyebrows and from under the little black shawl that covered her head.

'Drowned, drowned they will be!' shrieked Mary Mullen. She had gone on her two knees on a boulder, and she had put on a man's frieze waistcoat. She looked like a diver in it. It was buttoned up around her neck and three sizes too big for her.

The crashing of the waves against the cliffs to the west was drowning the wind. The wind came steadily, like the rushing of an immense cataract heard from a long distance. But the noises of the sea were continually changing. They rose and fell with the stupendous modulations of an orchestra played by giants. Each sound boomed or hissed or crashed with a horrid distinctness. It stood apart from the other sounds that followed and preceded it, as menacing and overwhelming as the visions that crowd on a disordered mind, each standing apart from the others in crazy independence.

Then the curragh hove into sight from the west, with the three men bending on their oars. A cliff jutted out into the sea, forming a breakwater where its sharp wedge-shaped face ended. Around that cliff the curragh appeared, a tiny black dot on the blue and white sea. For a moment the people saw it, and they murmured in a loud, awed whisper: 'There they are.' Then the curragh disappeared. It seemed to those on the beach that a monstrous wave surmounted it callously and that

it had been engulfed and lost forever, swallowed into the belly of the ocean. The women shrieked and threw their hands across their breasts, calling out to heaven: 'O Blessed Virgin, succor us!' But the men simply said to one another: "That's the "Wave of the Reaping Hook" that came down on them.' Still the men had their mouths open and they held their breath, and their bodies leaned forward from the hips watching to see the boat appear again. It did appear. There was an excited murmur: 'Hah! God with them!'

From the promontory which the curragh had just passed there was a calm strip of water lying across the cove, and the people could see the boat coming along all the time without losing sight of it. They recognized the men rowing. They said: "That's Stephen Halloran in the stern. He's too weak on a day like this for the stern. So he is.' They began to move cautiously down to the brink of the sea where the curragh would have to effect a landing. As the moment drew near when the curragh would have to brave the landing and the sharp rocks upon which the curragh and the three men might be dashed to pieces, the men on the beach grew more excited and some shivered.

The place where the boat would have to land was in the middle of the little cove. It was a jagged rock with a smooth place at the brink of its lefthand corner, where a slab had been torn out of it by thunder a few years before. In calm weather the sea came level with the rock at half tide, and it was easy to land there. But now the waves were coming over it like hills that had been overturned and had been rolled along a level plain speedily. The men on the beach stood at the edge of the rock and of the line of boulders, fifty yards away from the edge of the Yet the waves came to their feet when the sea swelled up. They shook

sea.

their heads and looked at one another. Peter Mullen's brother, a lanky man with a lame leg, made a megaphone of his hands and shouted to the men in the boat: 'Keep away as long as you can! You can't get through this sea!' But he could not be heard ten yards.

The curragh approached until it was within two hundred yards of the landing-place. The faces of the rowers were distorted and wild. Their bodies were taut with fear, and they moved jerkily with their oars, their legs stiff against the sides of the boat, their teeth bared. Two hundred yards away they turned their boat suddenly sideways. They began to row away from the landing-place. Silence fell on those on the beach. The men looked intently at the boat. The women rose to their feet and clasped one another. For half a minute there was silence that way while the boat manoeuvred for position.

Then simultaneously a cry arose from the men on the beach and from the men in the boat. With a singing sound of oars grating against the polished wet wood of the gunwale, the boat swung round to the landing. The singing sound of the oars, and the ferocious snapping of the men's breath as they pulled, could be heard over the roar of the sea, it came so suddenly. The boat faced the rocks. In three moments it would reach them.

Then the women standing on the boulders became mad with excitement. They did not shrink in fear from looking at the snaky black canvas-coated boat, with three men in her, that was cutting the blue and white water, dashing in on the rocks. They screamed, and there was a wild, mad joy in their screams. Big Bridget's eyes were no longer mournful — they were fiery like a man's. All the women, except Mary Mullen and Stephen Halloran's wife, looked greedily at the curragh; but they tore their hair and screamed with

voices of terror. Mary Mullen fell on her face on a boulder, and resting her chin on her hands, she kept biting her little fingers and saying in a whisper: 'Oh, noble son of my womb.' Stephen Halloran's wife rolled herself in her shawl, low down between two boulders, and she went into hysterics.

The men in the rapidly advancing boat yelled, a mad joyous yell, as if the rapidity of their movement, the roaring of the sea, the hypnotic power of the green and white water about them and the wind overhead screaming, had driven out fear. In the moment of delirium when their boat bore down on death they no longer feared death.

The crew, the men on the beach, the women on the boulders, were all mingled together for a mad moment in a common contempt of death and of danger. For a moment their cries surmounted the sound of the wind and sea. It was the defiance of humanity hurled in the face of merciless nature. And then again there was a pause. The noise of voices died.

On the back of a wave the boat came riding in, the oars stretched out, their points tipping the water. Then the oars dipped. There was a creak, a splash, a rushing sound, a panting of frightened breaths. A hurried babble of excited voices rose from the men on the beach. They waited in two lines with clasped hands. The foremost of them were up to their waists in water. The boat rushed in between the two lines. They seized the boat. The wave passed over their heads, there was a wild shriek, and then confusion. The boat and the foremost men were covered by the wave. Then the wave receded. The boat and the crew and the men holding the boat were left on the rock, clinging to the rock and to one another like a dragged dog clings to the earth. Then they rushed up the rock with the boat.